The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (24 page)

Finally, debates on whiteness beyond the academy occur in the construction of cultural conversations about “poor white trash.” Interestingly enough, Bill
Clinton figures as a key subject and subtext of such conversations. For many, Clinton is our nation’s
First Bubba
, our country’s
Trailer Trash Executive
, our nation’s
Poor White President
. It tells on our bigoted cultural beliefs and social prejudices that Clinton—a Georgetown University alumnus, a Rhodes Scholar, an Oxford University and Yale University Law School graduate, and a president of the United States—could be construed in many quarters as a poor white trash, “cracker” citizen. The study of whiteness prods us to examine the means by which a highly intelligent man and gifted politician is transmuted into “Bubba” for the purposes of intraethnic demonization.

Clinton, or at least his legal representatives, relied on the same prejudice that befell the president in their legal battles over sexual harassment with a very different victim in the poor white trash wars: Paula Jones. The intriguing subtext in Clinton’s fight against Jones’s suit was not simply about the hierarchy of gender, where a male’s prerogative in defining a sexual relationship is under attack through the discourse of sexual harassment. An even more powerful subtext is that Jones was a “po’white trash’ho.” By being so designated, Jones’s claim to sexual ownership of her body was much less prized in the popular mind-set than Clinton’s ownership of his sexual self. As a result, Jones’s believability was unfairly compromised by her degraded social and gender status. Beyond considerations of her relationship to political forces that oppose Clinton, Jones’s status reinforced the perception that gender and class cause one to be assigned a lower niche on the totem pole of poor white identity. And there are many, many more places where whiteness is being discussed far beyond the boundaries of the academy in ways that scholarly studies of whiteness are barely beginning to catch up to.

What do you think about President Clinton’s addresses on this issue of race? Did they serve in your mind as useful or productive means of expanding the public discourse on whiteness and race?

I think it’s important that the president of the United States help set the tone for how discourse about race will proceed. If we have any chance of rescuing the productive means by which race is articulated, we certainly have to have the “First Pedagogue” in place. And Clinton in that sense became a figure of estimable symbolic and even moral worth in setting a healthy tone for the debate about race. The means that he ingeniously seized on (which has been discussed in not altogether dissimilar ways in philosophical circles by Michael Oakeshott, Richard Rorty, and others) is that of conversation. The will to converse about race is motivated by an overriding concern: How can we adjudicate competing claims about race without tearing the essential fabric of American democracy that is embodied in the slogan,
E Pluribus Unum
, “Out of many, one”? If we’re already fractured at the level of identity, and this fractured identity is reproduced through mythologies of racial superiority and inferiority (or through narratives of whites being victimized by blacks in identity politics, affirmative action, multiculturalism, or political
correctness), how can we justly resolve disputes about relative victimization within the larger framework of American democracy? It’s a very messy business, and one that certainly calls for the president to become a leader in these matters. But his shouldn’t be the only or even the dominant voice. Still, Clinton created space for the conversation to take place.

It was important that Clinton open up the space of conversation about race; talking is infinitely better than shooting or stabbing or killing one another. It’s better than black men killing each other in the streets of Detroit or Chicago. It’s better than black people being beaten and killed by white policemen in New York or Los Angeles. It’s better than Latinas being victimized by the ideology and institutional expressions of anti-immigrant sentiment. Conversation certainly is superior to destroying one another and our nation.

Still, we mustn’t be naive. One of the supreme difficulties of discussing race in America is our belief in the possibility of morally equivalent views being reasonably articulated and justly examined. The implicit assumption of Clinton’s ideology of race conversation is debates among equals, or at least among people who have been equally victimized in American culture. But this is a torturous belief that obscures history and memory. We’ve got to unclog the arteries of collective American political memory.

In regard to race, we are living in the United States of Amnesia. We’ve got to revoke our citizenship in what Joseph Lowery terms “the 51st state, the state of denial.” That’s an extraordinarily disconcerting process, partly because what is demanded is the rejection of a key premise of liberal racial discourse: whites, blacks, and others share a common moral conception of racial justice, an ideal that regulates social practice and promotes the resolution of racial disputes. The politics and history of race have not supported this belief. To shift metaphors, what we’ve got to do is graft the skin of racial memory to the body of American democracy. That demands skillful rhetorical surgery and the operation of an intellectual commitment to truth over habit. In the conversation of race, we really must be willing to discover new ideas and explore ancient emotions. We can’t simply shout our prejudices louder than someone else’s defense of their bigotry.

If we’re going to have real progress in thinking and talking about race, we must not reduce racial issues to black and white. Race in American culture is so much more profound and complex than black and white, even though we know that conflict has been a major artery through which has flowed the poisonous blood of white supremacy and black subordination. There are other arteries of race and ethnicity that trace through the body politic. The tricky part is acknowledging the significant Latino, Asian, and Native American battles with whiteness that have taken place in our nation while admitting that the major race war has involved blacks and whites.

The political centrality and historical legitimacy of dealing with the mutual and dominant relations of whiteness to blackness in the development of what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call “racial formation” is simply undeniable. But such
a view must be balanced by paying attention to other racial and ethnic conflicts, as well as the intraracial, interethnic differences that reconstitute racial and ethnic identity and practice. It’s extremely important to get such a complex, heated, and potentially useful dialogue started.

A nagging question, however, remains: Who gets a chance to come to the race table to converse? Will poor people’s voices be heard? What about young people’s voices? In the conversation on race, there is the danger that we merely reproduce a liberal ideology of racial containment and mute the radical elements of race that might really transform our conversation and practice. Such a prospect appears inevitable if we refuse to shatter our ideological and intellectual grids in order to hear the other. What we don’t need is the crass and deceitful politics of toleration that masks the sources of real power that conceals the roots of real inequality, that ignores the voices of the most hurt, and that is indifferent to the faces of the most fractured. What we need is
real
conversation, the sort where hidden ambitions are brought to light, where masked motives are clarified to the point of social discomfort.

Such an aim of honest, hard conversation is what the so-called opponents of political correctness should have in mind when they launch their sometimes pedantic, always pejorative broadsides against the assertion of racial, ethnic, gender, class, and sexual difference. Instead, their ostensible desire to push beyond received racial truths ends up being an operation of rhetorical sleight of hand: they end up reasserting in new terms much older, biased beliefs. That’s why I’m so skeptical about many of the critics of so-called political correctness—they simply dress up bigotry in socially acceptable form by calling it “anti-PC,” when indeed it’s the same old political correctness: the poppycock of socially sanctioned racial disgust.

What we have to do, then, is to aim at a raucous debate where the impoliteness of certain people must be permitted because their pain is deep and unheeded. We must surely shatter the rituals of correctness and civility in order to hear from those whose voices have been shut out, where the ability to even articulate pain and rage has been delegitimized through social stigma. That’s the only way we have a chance of striking a just racial contract with our citizens. Taking all of what I’ve discussed into consideration, I think the conversation on race is a step in the right direction.

That gets us away from what Toni Morrison refers to as the “graceful” liberal practice—in the past, at least—of talking about people as if they were raceless, which we at one time thought was the best way. But what you’re suggesting is that that doesn’t work.

That’s right, such a move simply doesn’t work. As Du Bois said, there’s no way to deal with race without going through race; there’s no way of overcoming race without taking race into account. What we’ve had in our nation for too long is a willed ignorance about race; on one reading, it’s a perverse application of philosopher John Rawls’s notion of the “original position” in the social contract where we are placed behind a veil of ignorance in order to execute justice in the social realm. When we’ve misapplied this model to race, it has been quite disastrous. It’s failed primarily because we can’t justly assume a statutory ignorance about race and because the means to apply racial justice fall disproportionately into the hands of those against whom claims of injustice have been convincingly levied.

Further, the assumption of racelessness fails to account for the contents and identities of race that have always played a role in fashioning American views of justice. This is why I think identity politics must be given a historicist, materialist, and genealogical reading. Identity politics has been going on from the get-go in American culture, indeed, in cultures the world over. Aristotle and Plato and their followers were ensconced in identity politics; Descartes and Kant and their followers merely negotiating identity politics; Foucault and Derrida and their followers are embroiled in identity politics; and Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray and their followers are unquestionably involved in identity politics, though they, as I suspect the others I’ve named, would vehemently deny it.

That’s because many of them are or were transfixed by the dream of transcendental truth, Enlightenment rationality, deconstructive practice, or semiotic analysis that, for the most part, severs questions of identity from questions of racial politics. What we must come to see is that even when we deal with intellectual or theoretical issues, they refer to—although by no means are they reduced to or equated with—considerations of identity, even if such considerations are not explicitly articulated. The disingenuous character of too many debates about identity in America is that they deny this process.

After generating a genealogy of identity—which places our own accounts of universalism versus difference into historical context and acknowledges that identity politics occur in a variety of intellectual and social settings—we can press forward to an adequate and fair criticism of identity politics. As things stand, too many critics wrongly argue that we must move beyond narrow frameworks of identity to get to this universal identity. I have in mind the most recent writings of Todd Gitlin and Michael Tomasky. I share some of Gitlin’s and Tomasky’s concerns about the cultural dead ends of vicious identity politics that enshrine tribal preferences over the common good. But right away I disagree with them about what constitutes tribal preferences, how they can be justly eradicated, and what constitutes successful expressions of universal identities in the social and cultural realm.

In regard to whiteness, Gitlin and Tomasky fail to acknowledge that the particular identities of white people were rendered universal by a cultural and political process that punished blacks and other minorities for seeking to come into their own: their own identities, their own cultural repertoires, their own linguistic and rhetorical facilities, their own styles of survival, and so on. Until we are able to concede this point, we won’t get far in this debate about identity, about racelessness, and about the proper role that race should play, both in the American public sphere and in private institutions.

Do you see any contradiction between Clinton’s inviting everyone to the table to talk about race and yet not listening to all those voices in making policy—welfare reform, for instance—and excluding the very voices that we need to be hearing from?

There’s no question that there’s a deep contradiction in Clinton’s methodology. Further, there’s no question that in the past Clinton has not been above race baiting through very subtle semantic distortions and ideological gyrations. This surfaced in Clinton’s first run for the presidency, when his crass opportunism got the best of him as he attacked Sister Souljah for her violent racism without providing a thicker account of the conditions that shaped her comments, something Clinton was clearly capable of effectively pulling off. It surfaced when Clinton, during his first campaign, sent coded signals to alleviate white fears by suggesting that he and Gore would focus their policies on rescuing suburbia and middle America. It surfaced as well when Clinton failed to justly read the complex writings of his close friend, Lani Guinier, thereby encouraging her unjust demonization as a “quota queen.” It surfaced with Clinton’s support for a heinous crime bill that, like the welfare reform he supported, targeted black men and women with vicious specificity. And on and on.